“You are feeling sleepy, you are feeling sleepy, you are feeling sleepy…your hand appears to lift off, your hand moves towards a book and lifts it, I am in control of your actions…” Many of us have a vague idea that this is the sort of thing that a hypnotist might be saying as he begins to control his subject, but of course that is the thing that comes from horror stories where the hypnotised person then ends up committing some awful crime!

Dr Peter Naish(1), a cognitive psychologist and hypnotherapist, is interested in the scientific basis of hypnosis, and came to give a sell-out talk at Science Oxford Live to discuss his thoughts and findings.

To give us some background, Dr Naish discussed one of the earliest modern hypnotists (the practice of hypnotherapy is thought to go back as far as ancient Egypt) called Mesmer (1734-1815), who was a German physician claiming special powers to cure people by using magnetism intrinsic to his body. It turned out that whilst his therapy may have had some effect this was unrelated to magnetism because a “magnet” made out of wood painted with all the appropriate compass needles to look like one had the same effect as a real magnet, suggesting that all of the effect is in the mind of the subject.

With this in mind, Dr Naish argued that hypnotists, magnetists, and similar therapists do not have any special powers and that the treatment is all in the mind of the subject, with three main principles relating to hypnosis, which he kept reiterating throughout his talk

1. all sensation related to hypnosis is self-induced, it comes from the subject’s own mind
2. no task done under hypnosis can be ‘impossible’ – whilst it may feel that your hand may lift itself, you will not be able to lift a lorry under hypnosis because you wouldn’t be able to do so in a wakeful state
3. many of the actions of subjects supposedly hypnotised can be faked, so when researching the phenomenon one must be aware of such pitfalls

Dr Naish was by no means there to hood-wink his audience into believing things were due to hypnosis when they could just as easily be done by someone in their wakeful state. An example of this is the ‘human plank’ feat where stage hypnotists ask their subject to become very rigid (under supposed hypnosis) and are able to place them between two chairs. Yet, as he demonstrated with a young volunteer from the audience held by himself and another member of the audience, this can readily be achieved by a wakeful person who uses their abdominal muscles to keep their body in a rigid position.

One of the uses for hypnotherapy, Dr Naish suggested, can be in treating phobias. One of the accepted ways of treating a phobia (which is effectively an irrational fear of something, whether it is moths, balloons or maybe spiders) is to desensitise the person to the thing they are afraid of by getting them slowly used to seeing more and more of the fear-causing stimulus and getting closer and closer to it (for instance, can you cope with a spider in the next room, can you then cope with it across the room, can you then cope with it two metres away and so on). Whilst it may be quite easy to get hold of some balloons to try and teach someone how to cope with their presence, sourcing a large snake may be more of a problem. This is where hypnosis can come in handy, because to desensitise a patient using hypnosis, you can get them to imagine the cause of their fear, gradually working towards getting closer and closer to it without worrying that the object causing the fear will do something unpredictable (“a hypnotically induced spider does not scurry about unpredictably like a real one,” said Dr Naish).

But what about pain and pain control by hypnosis? We were shown a video made for a BBC documentary in which a dental patient chose to have cosmetic surgery involving the extraction of two teeth. Crucially, this was done without any anaesthetic and used hypnosis to control pain (if you are not too squeamish, you can look at it yourself on YouTube(2)), and looked relatively convincing. [As an aside, I would like to add a cautionary tale because not so long ago, the BBC produced a documentary on the use of acupuncture to control pain in open heart surgery, which was actually rather misleading – the patient was given acupuncture but at the same time was treated with three powerful sedatives and very large volumes of local anaesthetic in the chest cavity. The BBC received a complaint about this documentary, which was eventually upheld(3). So it is always worth to question things, even if they may look convincing at face value…] However, the impression I got from Dr Naish throughout his talk was that he was keen to get at the science behind the reasons that may make hypnotherapy work for *some* problems, and I have no reason to believe that the video would be shown if he knew it wasn’t genuine.

So then, what is the overall evidence for the efficiency of hypnosis in pain relief? As discussed in Ernst & Singh’s recent book, which set out to review the evidence available for and against the efficacy and safety of a number of different alternative therapies (Trick or Treatment: alternative medicine on trial), there have been a number of systematic reviews suggesting that hypnosis may be efficient in pain relief in some conditions, similarly to meditation. But how does this work? One of the possible ways in which hypnosis might relieve pain would be the placebo effect. A placebo is a pill/cream/injection that contains no active ingredient, such as a sugar pill or a salt water injection. However, if the patient believes that they are being given an active medicine, they may get better simply because they believe they will. This is particularly true for pain. It is likely that the placebo effect for pain relief is linked to the release of endorphins, which are effectively intrinsically produced pain killers. Related to the pain-killer morphine, endorphin release can be blocked by the administration of the compound naloxone (a drug used to counter the effects of opiates such as morphine and heroin), and it can be shown that the placebo effect for pain relief can be cancelled out by the administration of naloxone. What about hypnosis and pain relief? Well, as Dr Naish explained, it turns out that naloxone does not cancel out the analgesic (pain-relieving) effect of hypnosis, and there must be something to hypnosis that goes beyond the placebo effect.

In order to study the scientific basis for hypnosis, Dr Naish explained, one has to identify an intrinsic effect that is specific to hypnotised as opposed to wakeful brains and that can be measured (this has become easier with the advent of brain scanners, which can tell us which part of the brain is active at any one particular time). One such effect may be something called hypnotic time distortion, which explains why people who are easy to hypnotise find that when asked to describe the length of their experience, they struggle to estimate correctly the time they have been in the hypnotized state for. Is hypnotic time distortion the way into research of the state? Curiously, time distortion is something also observed in schizophrenics and Parkinson’s disease patients, as well as those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) where vivid flashbacks observed a year or more after the event can feel like they happened a couple of weeks ago. (Actually, the PTSD case is much more interesting to studying hypnosis because the brains of these individuals are healthy; they just have been pushed into PTSD by a particularly traumatic experience).

So is it possible that time distortion is linked to changes in consciousness? An interesting insight into the detachment from reality associated with hypnosis comes from looking at the role of inhibition of self-sensing. As you will probably know if you’ve ever tried to tickle yourself, you won’t feel the same sensation as you would if somebody else tickled you. This is because self-initiated actions are accompanied by inhibitory signals sent to the receptors so you “don’t hear yourself think” (one theory is that schizophrenics don’t have this inhibition system fully functioning so that they hear their own thinking as “voices”). Dr Naish described a simple apparatus where the subject’s finger is rested on a lever and can be moved either voluntarily or by the experimenter. When asked to say when the finger moved, self-movement was detected very quickly, but experimenter induced movement much more slowly. Interestingly, a movement that is self-induced under hypnosis was also detected later by the subject, suggesting that when hypnotised, the subject may perceive the movement as caused externally. This is apparently supported by the fact that brain scans of people under hypnosis show that, like in schizophrenics, there is a lack of receptor inhibition associated with stimuli coming from self so the subject might more readily think that the movement was caused by an external factor.

Dr Naish rounded off his discussion of the scientific experiments exploring hypnosis with an explanation of a set up where the shift of brain hemisphere usage from left to right can be measured. This involves a pair of sunglasses which have two LEDs, one on either side, which flash in quick succession, either right first then left or vice versa. The subject has to say which order the flashes went in by pressing a button and the time (in the range of milliseconds) it takes is measured(4). It turns out that subjects which are difficult to hypnotise are able to get the flash order in a similar length of time, whether the order is left-then-right or right-then-left. They do get slower when under hypnosis, presumably due to being relaxed, but crucially they get equally slower in both left-then-right and right-then-left situations. In contrast, subjects which are more susceptible to hypnosis are much slower in one direction when in the wakeful state, but the difference becomes reversed when they are hypnotised. Dr Naish went on to explain that this may involve a right-ward shift in the usage of brain hemispheres to process information whilst in the hypnotic state. He also explained that when the higher order thought circuitry of the left-hand hemisphere is temporarily disturbed by trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the subject’s brain can be made temporarily more hypnotisable, supporting the theory that people who are more readily hypnotised tend to be dominant in the use of the right-hand hemisphere. It certainly seemed like there were still plenty of experiments left to explore!

Overall, a very interesting talk even to someone as sceptical as myself, and it certainly generated quite a lot of discussion in the Q&A session. Can hypnosis be dangerous? It looks like it shouldn’t be to someone with a healthy brain, but is best avoided by those with metal instabilities who might find hypnosis to be just the push to spiral them towards full-blown schizophrenia. But apparently a subject can’t be lost in a hypnotic state – if they “don’t want to come back”, they will simply fall asleep eventually and just wake up in their own time. How can hypnotherapy for smoking cessation work if the nicotine addiction involves receptors stimulated by the nicotine? Well, Dr Naish thought there was no reason why hypnosis could not help smokers get rid of their addiction though he did not have a suggestion for how this would work, but I will warn you that systematic reviews of the evidence for and against hypnotherapy in smoking cessation currently suggest that it is not effective in this case(5). At the end, perhaps to avoid us all asking the same question over post-talk wine, Dr Naish rounded off with a spot of hypnosis. He got all of his audience to relax and tried to hypnotically induce the lifting of one of our arms, followed by a hypnotically induced fly wandering over our cheek and by us returning to our schooldays to walk around the school building we once used to spend a lot of time in. I did not feel the arm or fly and thought back to my school-days, but am not sure whether it was not simply because I was consciously trying to remember details, but others said it worked for them, so maybe I’m not very hypnotisable! (Dr Naish did say there are some people who are more readily hypnotised than others – he knows himself to be amongst those who are not readily hypnotised).

If you’ve missed the talk you can watch it below (minus the spot of hypnosis at the end):

Some further reading:

(1) Dr Peter Naish academic profile on the Open University website: http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/staff/people-profile.php?name=Peter_Naish

(2) Video of teeth extraction with hypnosis replacing anaesthesia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgu6vk3_ByE

(3) A cautionary tale about having to dig deeper when you are shown something that is supposed to prove a certain effect:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3344833/Did-we-really-witness-the-amazing-power-of-acupuncture.html

(4) The ‘glasses’ experimental setup used to measure which part of the brain is involved in deciding the order in which the lights flash:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11373280

(5) Although the Cochrane Collaboration database of systematic reviews contains a number of reviews supporting the use of hypnotherapy in pain relief, they have found no evidence for the use of hypnotherapy in smoking cessation:
http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab001008.html

On February the 14th we will be inclined to show our loved ones what they mean to us with tacky sentiments and novelty merchandise, but I’ve noticed we seem to be lacking something that most other corporate holidays cash in on – a mascot. Christmas has the reindeer and the robin, Easter has the bunny and the chick, and Valentine’s? Well yes it has the cupid, but flying chubby children just don’t say “I love you” the way a little fluffy creature from nature can. So here, I present to the corporate world the money makers – the top five creatures that will do anything for love.

The Bowerbird Bachelors

When I think of the term “bachelor pad” it conjures up images of unwashed undies, old beer cans, and questionable décor – but not if you were a Bowerbird. The Bowerbird gets its name from the males’ elaborate attempts at attracting a mate. They build structurally complicated and eccentric nests out of sticks and saplings – some even construct thatched roofs. Once their feat of engineering is complete, these multi-skilled birds decorate their “love nest” with the finest riches a lady Bowerbird could ask for. Precisely what the Bowerbird decorates his bower with differs between species and usually follows some sort of colour scheme. For example, the female Satin Bowerbird seems to go gaga for blue, and so the male busies himself for days hoarding any blue knick-knacks he can find. People have found shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, and berries littering the nest sites, but Bowerbirds don’t discriminate against the man-made merchandise, they have also been found to collect discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, and pieces of glass. The bird will spend days, arranging each piece just so. Ladies will visit many nest sites within her area and spend time carefully inspecting each of the efforts, sometimes returning to a prospective nest multiple times. Once confident she has identified the bower that satisfies her tastes, she will copulate and leave. Perhaps not the most romantic ending, but the male certainly deserves points for effort.

Scorpion Seduction

Dinner and dancing is a pretty standard date in the life of a female scorpion – the only thing is, the dance is actually a life-threatening battle between potential mating partners, and if it goes badly for the male, he could end up being served up as dinner. The ritual is usually held on a moonless night, in open expanses where males and females can be seen to judder and gyrate before contact. This process allows scorpions to recognise and assess each other’s compatibility through vibration and pheromone cues. After twenty minutes or so the male will approach the female, and grab her by the pincers. Holding her, face to face, they commence a sensual dance known as the “promenade à deux”, males have even been seen to “kiss” the female, nibbling her large pincer-like jaws. The real purpose of this, it is thought, is to inject a small amount of venom into her body, making her a more docile, and the encounter a little less risky for the male! During this elaborate dance, a space is cleared to enable him to safely deposit a package of sperm – known as a spermatophore. He then carefully directs her over the package, and when in position, she will take the deposit up into her reproductive tract. After fertilization the male doesn’t hang around for a cuddle, he must make a quick escape or run the risk of being eaten by the female – charming!

Snail Sex

You would think, perhaps, that snail sex would be a rather slow and sticky affair – and well, you’d be right – but couples pre-copulatory behaviour has shown snails to be very attentive and gentle lovers, spending between fifteen minutes and twelve hours “kissing” and “caressing” their partners before sex occurs. This rather graphic display of public affection does have a purpose; the male must locate the right location for which to fire his love dart – and that’s not just what the cool kids are calling it, it is in fact the scientific name for the male reproductive organ. Like cupid’s arrow, covered in mucus, the male lines himself up for the shot, and fires. The mucus causes the female’s reproductive tract to contract and greatly increases the amount of sperm she stores. It seems this process is not particularly enjoyable for the female, who suffers significant damage from the ordeal. Although, researchers have seen males with chronically poor aim fire a mis-shot through a female’s brain, and the females still live to tell the tale. Who knew snail sex was such a messy and hazardous business!

Squid Adoration: More hearts = More love

If, when it comes to love it’s not the size of the heart that matters but the number, the squid definitely wins hands down. Yes, oddly enough the squid has three hearts – two which take blood to and from each of the gills, and a larger one which pumps blood around the rest of the body. In terms of reproduction, there’s not a whole lot of romance and the job is undertaken fairly matter-of-factly, although, deep sea squid are known for their exceptionally long penises. When erect, the penis can grow as long as the head, mantle and tentacles combined. “So in the words of Lionel Richie, when it comes to hearts, ‘she’s once, twice, three times a lady’, and when it comes to penises, ‘he’s once, twice…’”.

Anglerfish: “’til death do we part”

And our final candidate is one of the few truly monogamous creatures in nature, the Anglerfish. Interestingly, when scientists first started collecting samples of this alien-like deep sea fish, they couldn’t understand why they were only able to find females. Then they began to notice and unusual trend, that most of the specimens had small “parasites” attached to them, which later they found out to be the males – “insert inappropriate joke here”.

These deep sea fish live a life down in the depths of the oceans, too deep for even light to reach – although I think if they could see what each other looked like the survival of their species might be under threat. In order to find and keep a mate under these conditions, you need to have a trick or two up your sleeve. From birth, the males have a highly developed sense of smell which allows them to detect the proximity of any nearby females by identifying the pheromones she releases into the water. When he finds a mate, he bites down into her skin and latches on. As he bites, he simultaneously releases an enzyme which digests the tissues of his mouth and her body, causing the remaining flesh to fuse together. The male then slowly becomes completely dependent on the female for survival, first losing his digestive tract, then his brain, heart, and eyes, until he is nothing more than a pair of gonads – “there are just so many jokes to be made here it almost seems too easy”. The male will then continue to periodically release sperm into the female, initiating egg release and fertilisation. The pair will remain together until the death of the female, which unavoidably, also results in the death of her partner.

So when it comes to presents this Valentine’s, try showing your partner you really care with a personalised gift inspired by nature. Perhaps deliver them a garden snail in a box with the message, “you’re love dart, went straight to my heart”, or a cuddly stuffed Anglerfish that when you squeeze its belly says “I’ll stick to you like a parasitic male Anglerfish”.
“Ah, doesn’t it just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?”

Sources
Wikipedia entries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish
National Geographic:
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/anglerfish.html
Lovebirds and Love Darts: The Wild World of Mating; Reported in National Geographic News, by Hillary Mayell, 13 February 2004

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Christmas is here, and magic is in the air. On December the 24th children will be asleep in their beds hoping they’ve been good enough to have earned a visit from jolly old St. Nicholas – and this got me thinking about Santa Claus and his mystical existence. After much deliberating, I have come to a rather bizarre conclusion: Santa’s main occupation is not a magical delivery man, but a superb scientist. And his elves? They’re top notch research assistants, working away until Christmas day, to ensure every boy and girl around the world receive something special to make them smile. Of course, the sophisticated research and development programme behind Santa’s Christmas eve antics are top secret – but using a little scientific logic, I propose a few hypotheses of how Santa, and his faithful crew, might just do it.

The Science of the Sleigh

So let’s start by doing a little light maths. As of 2008, UNICEF calculated there were 2.2 billion children in the world under the age of 18. The average number of children per household across the world is 2.5, so that makes 880 million chimneys to visit. Over a land mass area of 58 million square miles, and assuming the houses are equidistant from each other, means Santa would have to travel about 229 million miles over the course of Christmas eve. That’s one major commute!

In order to reach every house in 24 hours Santa must visit over 36 million houses per hour (or 10,000 houses per second), at an average speed of 9.5 million miles per hour. But, in fact, Santa has 48 hours to deliver all the presents, because if you assume Santa will start delivering from the first country to pass through the international date line at midnight on December the 24th, he can then work against the rotation of the Earth, thus doubling his delivery time, and visiting 5,000 houses per second, at only 4.75 million miles per hour (ok, I haven’t taken into account the hours of darkness, but let’s not quibble) – piece of cake! Well, not quite, but it is not against the physical laws of relativity – Einstein showed the speed of light is absolute, and cannot be exceeded, but the speed of light is at around 186,000 miles per second, and Santa is travelling at a mere 1,319 miles per second, 141 times slower!

These, however, are not trivial speeds, and the technology required to allow Santa and his reindeer to withstand such large g-forces as would be experienced at 1,319 miles per second is something quite remarkable. The only way Santa could survive such force would be to create an artificial atmosphere around his sleigh which could respond to the accelerating force with some kind of reactionary anti-gravitational field. But there is another problem – Santa may be nowhere near the speed of light, but he would have to travel faster than the speed of sound (which is about 750 miles per hour). When an object exceeds the speed of sound there is a loud noise called “the sonic boom”. This happens because the travelling object catches up with the pressure waves it generates while moving, thus producing a shock wave, which is heard as a large bang. So why are we not continuously woken up on Christmas eve by Santa’s speedy sleigh? The technology we’re considering is already getting a little sci-fi, so why not propose teleportation?

Perhaps not quite as science fiction as one might think it was realised in 1998 when a group of physicists from the Californian Institute of Technology, along with two other groups from Europe, managed to successfully teleport a photon – a particle of energy that carries light – a few feet across a room, without crossing any physical distance in between. Since then in 2002, researchers from the Australian National University transported a laser beam, and most recently, in 2009 Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute and his team, teleported matter in the form of a few sub atomic particles from one atom, to another. At the moment this is only possible for atomic and sub atomic particles because of their unusual physical properties which allows them to adopt an “entangled state”. Once two objects are entangled, their properties are inextricably linked and thus the state of one object instantly determines the state of the other, irrespective of physical distance. However, the teleportation of larger particles is theoretically not impossible, assuming one could recreate the atomic conditions of one place somewhere else, and entangle the atoms between the two locations together.

Our technologies are far from enabling Starship Enterprise-like travel, but then again, the elves might be intellectually superior to the human race, so if we can assume that Santa’s elves are much more technologically advanced in the field of quantum mechanics, perhaps Santa’s sleigh no longer needs to fly, and as the population of the world increased, technology met Santa’s growing demands, and he never had to let a child down at Christmas. This also conveniently overcomes the problem of chimneyless houses, and so I am happy to propose a modern day Santa has abandoned flight for a more modern approach of teleportation. So we may have a satisfactory hypothesis behind Santa’s travel technology, but what about those reindeer?

The Research behind Rudolph

My research into reindeer life-history revealed a shocking revelation regarding Rudolph’s true identity – he might, in fact, be a she. The history of Rudolph can be traced back to 1939, when a red nosed reindeer appeared in a book by Robert L. May, since then Rudolph has become a common part of Christmas folklore. However, though reindeer are the only deer species where both males and females possess antlers, the males lose theirs just after the mating season when they are no longer required for rutting, which means males do not bear antlers during the winter months. It is possible that due to the male dominated social politics of the time, Rudolph’s true identity was covered up, and she was masculinised. Another possible explanation for Rudolph’s antlers comes from traditional Sami practises. Sami’s (indigenous nomadic people of northern Scandinavia, many of whom still practise reindeer herding) castrate the male reindeer they use to pull or carry loads, in order to subdue aggressive tendencies during the breeding season. This alters the normal antler cycle and they tend to keep their antlers for longer than sexually functional males. So perhaps Santa, whose location has been suggested as Lapland in Northern Finland where Sami still live and herd their reindeer today, has adopted these practises.

The last mystery I want to tackle is that of Rudolph’s nose. In the dark dreary conditions of Christmas eve it is Rudolph’s responsibility to guide Santa’s sleigh safely through the night (or at least it was before the advancements of teleportation), but what makes his nose glow so bright? My guess is bioluminescence.
Bioluminescence describes the process where living animals are able to produce light by controlled chemical reactions. This impressive skill is used by many animals from marine to land, and microorganisms to vertebrates. For example, the Hawaiian Bobtail squid and the light producing bacteria Vibrio fischeri form a symbiotic relationship whereby each species helps the other out. The squid often falls prey to hunters at night, when they are most active. Squid feed near the surface of the water, and predators usually wait in the depths to look for shadows cast by the squid as they pass through the moonlit waters. In order to camouflage themselves, squid will house colonies of light producing bacteria on their underside which breaks up the shadow, and so, allows them to pass over the predator undetected. In return, the squid provides shelter and nutrients for the bacteria. So, could Rudolph have a similar symbiotic relationship with an arctic equivalent of Vibrio fischeri? The North Pole is dark for about six months of the year. A mutualism with a light producing microorganism would provide Rudolph with an evolutionary advantage, by allowing him to find food and other resources in the dark months. The bacteria would have to be extremophiles in order to survive the harsh conditions of the North Pole – extremophiles are organisms which are able to survive in extreme geological and physical conditions, such as in extraordinarily hot, acidic, or indeed, freezing conditions. By forming a mutualistic relationship with Rudolph, these bacteria would be exposed to far less extreme conditions, compared to the outside world. Overtime, both bacteria and Rudolph could evolve to be reliant on each-other for survival, and as such, a long term mutualism will evolve. If Santa realised its potential, he could perhaps even collect and culture the bacteria which live in Rudolph’s nose. This way he could artificially increase the intensity of light by inoculating Rudolph with an extra dose of bacteria when required – on Christmas eve.

Unfortunately we will never know how Santa does it. And perhaps, there is a little magic required for it to all come together, but if Clement Clark Moore knew what we did when he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, it might have read a little more like this:

“It’s the eve before Christmas, and all though the night
Santa is travelling with entangled flight,
With millions of children asleep in their beds,
The teleport keeps him one step ahead.
And silently working hard through the night,
The reindeer still sore from their castrated plight,
And relying on bugs in Rudolph’s red nose,
They pull with their might, though their tiredness grows
And as hours go on, and day is in sight,
They drop the last present off for the night,
And back to the pole, with a “beam me up Scotty”,
Santa can rest, with a well-earned hot toddy.”

Merry Christmas everyone.

Sources:
Many ideas and concepts from this article were taken from a wonderful book: “Can reindeer fly?”, by Roger Highfield

Additional Sources:
Olmschenk S., Matsukevich D.N., Maunz P., Hayes D., Duan L.M. & Monroe C. (2009). Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits. Science 323: 486-489.
Teleportation breakthrough made, Reported on BBC news by Paul Rincon, 2004
Photon teleportation achieved, Reported in the Cern Courier, 2000
Teleportation Milestone Achieved, Reported in LiveScience, 2009
Bubenik GA, Schams D, White RJ, Rowell J, Blake J, Bartos L (1997). Seasonal Levels of Reproductive Hormones and Their Relationship to the Antler Cycle of Male and Female Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part B: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 116: 269-277.
Why is Ruldolph’s nose red? By John Fuller, for TLC Family

An audience braving the bitter cold were rewarded with a warm welcome at Science Oxford Live on the 25th November 2010 to explore the five senses of touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell, with neuroscientist Professor Charles Spence. They cringed at the world’s loudest crisp packet, now withdrawn from sale as found to be too irritating and lingered over chocolate and wine, while an explanation of innovative packaging for cleaning products set the mood for spring. Speaker Charles Spence took the time to satisfy their questioning in full, explaining how designers of all kinds delight in playing with the sensory experiences scientists seek to understand.

He illustrated how this is all in the spirit of science as combining different sensual elements can both entice and confuse our response. More red colour and things taste sweeter as we naturally think of ripe berries and listening to chicken noises can enhance the taste of egg. Our brains mix the cocktail of information from our senses to produce our overall experience. Could this be why as the saying goes, ‘food always tastes better outdoors?’ Familiarity can influence this super additive sensual effect, a drop of sugar on the tongue can increase ability to smell almond with salt having the same effect for a Japanese palate more used to this taste combination.

Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is capitalising on this phenomenon, pairing blood orange with orange beetroot for an unexpected colour and taste combination and using digitised sea sounds to accompany fish. This interesting innovation can be sampled in his restaurant the Fat Duck near Slough. The Science Oxford audience suggested that while the medium is novel the idea of using sounds, especially music to enhance the eating experience is age old. I will resist the temptation to quote Shakespeare for fear of sounding too cheesy.

The audience were very willing to test things out for themselves by sampling dark and milk chocolate squares. For me, it was absolutely certain even before catching a whiff, milk chocolate was clearly wobbly rounded shape buba with a medium deep not played on a woodwind. Dark high percentage coco could only be spiky tuki played on a violin. While this seemed to reflect the audience consensus, and previous studies, there was plenty of space for individuality. A musician pointed out that he is so in tune with sound elements that other sensual cues fade into the background.

The audience were intrigued about how sensory cues could be used to influence settings for social benefit, such as painting walls in prison a particular shade of pale pink, shown to be calming, and careful choice of colour and scent in hospitals to appropriately stimulate and relax. They warned that in some situations reactions could be mixed if people suspect artificial sense enhancement is at work. Charles Spence emphasised that he considers the underlying intent and execution of manipulation is the important issue. Personally, he appreciates sensual enhancement where it increases enjoyment of an experience. A starter for a sizzling debate?

It’s Halloween: time to turn down the lights, and gather round for a horrific tale of what waits for you in the shadows… luring you into its lair… creatures capable of turning ordinary souls into monsters… and beasts that can control your mind to carry out their evil bidding. This is a true story of some unpleasant parasites that might just be coming, for you.

Parasites survive by exploiting their hosts. A parasitic way of life is arguably one of the most successful on the planet. For every organism, there are parasites which can infect it. There are even parasites of parasites, and like a Russian doll, these get smaller still, until you begin to consider genetic parasites, which are no more than rogue pieces of DNA, manipulating the host genome to do its dirty work. What’s more, parasites have evolved some very sneaky ways to manipulate, control and deceive their hosts to ensure their survival and transmission. Here are a few particularly gruesome examples of parasitic tricks of the trade.

MASTERS OF MIND CONTROL

“Brainwashing” hosts to increase transmission rates is a common ploy for parasites. One of the better understood mechanisms is that of the parasitic protozoa; Toxoplasma gondii. T. gondii has two life stages, a sexual stage which takes part inside the gut of a cat, and an asexual phase where the parasite forms cysts within the brain and muscles of an intermediate host which can be any small mammal or bird. The parasite relies on the intermediate host falling prey to a feline in order to complete its lifecycle, and it has evolved a rather ingenious way of ensuring its transmission. Ajai Vyas and his team from Stanford University found that rodents infected with T. gondii seemed to be attracted by the smell of cat urine, an aroma uninfected individuals would actively avoid. Vyas found parasitic cysts tended to concentrate in the amygdala in the rodent’s brain. This part of the brain is associated with fear and anxiety, and they believe the parasite is able to target specific neural pathways in order to manipulate normal behavior of cat aversion, and as such, significantly increase the chances of the rodent becoming feline food.

Mosquitoes are a human ectoparasite (a parasite which lives outside the host), but these are not the pests I want to talk about. At times they can be a nuisance, but they can also make a deadly delivery. Malaria is one of the most important causes of human mortality in the modern world. The mosquito acts as a vector for the protist, Plasmodium falciparum (the organism which causes malaria), which uses the mosquito as an intermediate host in order to reach its target – humans. Research by Lacroix and his team found the malaria parasite was able to manipulate the behaviour of the mosquito, to find humans infected with the transmissible stage of malaria to be more attractive than other potential hosts. Others studies also showed differences in biting behaviour, with a decreased biting frequency during early infection (thus increasing the chances of host survival until the protist has time to develop), and increased biting frequency once the protist was infective to humans (thus increasing transmission rate). The mechanisms which the protist uses to alter its host’s behaviours are not understood, but research such a Vyas’s team into Toxoplasma gives hope that one day we might understand such mechanisms which could help develop better prevention strategies and ultimately save lives.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Some parasites are small and subtle, stealthily changing the characteristics of their host to increase transmission. Other parasites have more of a “bull in a china shop” approach with their host, as is the story of the hairworm and the grasshopper. Hairworms excrete a cocktail of chemicals into the grasshopper which mimic the natural neural signals, and so, highjack the grasshopper’s nervous system. This triggers suicidal “death leaps” into water, where the parasite needs to reach in order to complete its lifecycle. A grasshopper becomes infected after drinking larvae infested water. Once ingested, the worm will grow inside the grasshopper until it takes up almost its entire body cavity (only the legs and head will be unoccupied). At this point the grasshopper can been observed to take a suicidal spring into water, where (and here’s the gruesome bit) a worm, which is up to four times larger than the grasshopper, emerges from its rear end and swims off to find a mate. Hugh Loxdale, president of the London-based Royal Entomological Society, said “It’s one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen… It makes the science fiction film Alien look pretty tame in comparison.”

Figure 1: The sequence of events as the hairworm emerges from its grasshopper host. The grasshopper irrationally jumps into the water (due to neural cues induced by the hairworm), and once in contact with the water, the worm emerges and swims away to find a mate. The grasshopper, inevitably, dies.
Credit: VB Films/CNRS Images Media

Figure 2: The tongue-eating louse eats and replaces its host’s tongue and feeds.
Credit: Dr. Nico Smit

Talking of Alien, does figure 2 remind you of anything? This terrifying invader is Cymothoa exigua, more commonly known as the tongue-eating louse. This little louse enters its host fish through the gills, and attaches itself to the base of the tongue. Frontal claws are used to drain blood from the tongue until it wastes away. The parasite then attaches itself to the muscles of the tongue’s stub, and replaces the organ. Gruesome as it seems, the parasite does not appear to cause any additional damage to its host, feeding only on small amounts of blood and mucus from the fish’s mouth, and the fish can use its new squatter almost as it would its old tongue. It is unknown how long this association can last, but neither the host nor the parasite benefit from the fish’s death, and so it seems, the partnership could potentially last a lifetime.

THE PARADOXICAL PARASITE

As a final note, I thought I’d end on a horrid high note. The concept of a harmonious hookworm might seem contradictory, but sometimes the dark forces can be used for good. The hookworm is very prevalent within the third world. Infection is usually caused by walking barefoot in soil contaminated with faecal matter. The worm will burrow into the foot and migrate through the vascular system to the lungs. From there they crawl up the trachea, and are swallowed in order to reach the digestive system. Their final resting place is in the intestine where they latch onto the intestine wall and feed off the host’s blood. In large numbers these critters can cause anaemia and protein deficiency, including emaciation, cardiac failure and abdominal distension. So why, you might ask, would people in the developed world be purposefully infecting themselves with such vile creatures?

Autoimmune diseases; such as Crohn’s disease, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome (IBD), multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes and allergies, are common in the developed world. In these diseases an over-reactive immune system begins to attack the body, which can result in some serious complications. The “hygiene hypothesis” proposes that the increased rate of autoimmune diseases has been caused by over-sterility of the environment during early childhood. Reducing exposure to infectious agents such as microorganisms and parasites (which in evolutionary terms our body is evolved to encounter) during the maturation of the immune responses might have negative effects. Under-stimulation of the immune system during early years can lead to an overactive long term response to foreign agents in the body; the result is an autoimmune disease.

This has led to the development of “helminthic therapy”, which is the use of parasitic helminths (worms) to “dampen down” the response of the immune system. It is not entirely clear how the immune responds to the worms, but patients suffering from autoimmune disorders have too many over-sensitive T-helper cells (which identify potentially dangerous agents and mark them for irradiation by the body’s “solider cells” such as macrophages and antibodies). T-cells are self-regulating, and so activation of certain types (in this case, by the presence of the worms) will result in the deactivation of others. Under these conditions a negative feedback is established, and eventually, a healthy balance can be established.

So would you be tempted to take a drink of probiotic parasitic worms to treat your hay fever, or IBD? There are now many subscribers to the new treatments, and so far the reports back are very positive. But more research is required to understand the specific relationship between the parasite and host, and how numbers and transmission rates are to be controlled.

And so, perhaps you were disgusted, intrigued, or even converted by my horrific tales of parasite behaviour. Writing this article, I for one was amazed at how parasites have evolved so many ways to manipulate and deceive their hosts, but I’m not sure I want one of my own yet!

SOURCES

• Parasite “Brainwashes” Rats Into Craving Cat Urine, Study Finds By Ben Harder for National Geographic News, 2007
• Vyas A, Kim SK, Giacomini N, Boothroyd JC, Sapolsky RM (2007). Behavioral changes induced by Toxoplasma infection of rodents are highly specific to aversion of cat odors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104: 6442-6447.
• Lacroix R, Mukabana WR, Gouagna LC, Koella JC (2005). Malaria Infection Increases Attractiveness of Humans to Mosquitoes. PLoS Biol 3: e298.
• Suicide Grasshoppers Brainwashed by Parasite Worms, By James Owen for National Geographoc News, 2005
• Biron DG, Marche L, Ponton F, Loxdale HD, Galeotti N, Renault L et al (2005). Behavioural manipulation in a grasshopper harbouring hairworm: a proteomics approach. Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 272: 2117-2126.
• Brusca RC, Gilligan MR (1983). Tongue Replacement in a Marine Fish (Lutjanus guttatus) by a Parasitic Isopod (Crustacea: Isopoda). Copeia 1983: 813-816.
• Eat worms – feel better, Reported on BBC news, 2003
  Reddy A, Fried B (2009). An update on the use of helminths to treat Crohn’s and other autoimmunune diseases. Parasitology Research 104: 217-221.
• McKay DM (2006). The beneficial helminth parasite? Parasitology 132: 1-12.

Well…erm…

OK, I will have shocked you nicely and perhaps intrigued you almost as much with the blog title. Indeed, the title is not altogether different from Dr Petra Boynton’s title of her Science Oxford Live talk that she gave on 7th October, and I suspect it intrigued just as many people. (As an occasional volunteer at Science Oxford Live, I had said I would be available on that date, and was amused to receive an e-mail reply saying that “I’ve put you down for The Brain on 30th September, and Sex on 7th October”!)

Dr Petra Boynton describes herself as a “Sex educator, Agony Aunt, Academic” on her website, and goes on to say that she is involved in academic research (focussed on sex and relationships in themselves but also on how policy, modernisation and new technologies may affect sexual education and sexual health in various countries), but also in teaching doctors, nurses and other health professionals about sex education. And she certainly comes across as an engaging speaker – but then I guess you’d have to be, with that sort of field of research, wouldn’t you?

Dr Boynton was one of the speakers asked to come back ‘by popular demand’ to Science Oxford Live as part of its 5th birthday celebrations and she certainly proved why she had been so popular the first time round. Her very engaging style contrasted greatly with the most simplistic presentation I had ever seen, consisting only of a set of questions, one per slide. “Those that were asked by previous audiences at talks, in e-mails and past discussions”, she told us, suggesting that they would give a good framework for the talk to come.

“What is sex?” the as-yet shy audience were asked. There were some suggestions about the “special cuddle” and the thing that happens “when a man loves a woman”, but Dr Boynton was having none of that, putting up a list of all the things that sex might represent. For those of you intrigued, these may include anything from masturbation (alone or with a partner), to vaginal penetration, and through more obscure practices such as BDSM (the audience appeared pleased that one of us had the courage to ask what this acronym means!) to phone/text/e-mail sex (the interesting question being, do you have to be in physical contact with someone to be having sex?). In fact, rather interestingly, Dr Boynton pointed out that such lack of clarity can often confuse some sex surveys, because people don’t always agree on what sex actually means!

“Why do people have sex?”, she continued. It appeared that the audience was slightly more conservative with their answers (“because it feels good” or “to have children”) than some of the undergraduate students that had previously answered a survey carried out to find out the answer to this question (amongst others), with their more bizarre answers ranging from “wanting to feel closer to God”, “being bored” and simply “feeling like it”. On a more serious note, Dr Boynton explained that sometimes sexual education for teenagers concentrates far too much on the sexual health itself rather than trying to encourage young people to find things to do that they enjoy, and as a result not be subject to the boredom that often leads them to have sex simply because they’re bored (a fact I didn’t know before, but apparently the prevalence of teenage pregnancies goes up in the summer school holiday months).

“How do you research sex?”, you might have wondered. Well, so did many other people before you and Petra duly explained that, to many people’s disappointment, much of this work is carried out through surveys and by analysing study subjects’ “sex diaries”. And although experiments in the lab, where the subjects are wired up to measure all sorts of bodily signals (eg. brain activity) whilst having sex, are carried out, these are much rarer because of the unnaturalness of the whole set-up (apparently it takes a couple quite a lot of practice to be able to have sex in a laboratory whilst managing to be wired up to several different machines…).

In that vein, Dr Boynton’s talk continued, covering questions ranging from whether female ejaculate exists and what it is, what the correct erection etiquette during dancing is (what should you do – as either the bloke or the girl – if a man and a woman dance together, with the guy getting excited and this being noticed?), how often one should have sex (apparently, there isn’t a “should” about this, and the answer is very individual), all the way to whether she used to scare men away when dating when she told them what her job was. And although shy at the beginning, as a result of Dr Boynton’s flamboyant and open attitude and approach, the audience got more and more drawn in to discussing a topic that is often seen as a taboo even though it shouldn’t be (nevertheless, I am still debating how best to cover the talk in this blog without offending anyone!). By the end of the talk, people were happy to ask questions (even though there had been a box provided before the talk for anonymous questions, if they existed), and the talk provided a partly light-hearted but partly serious discussion on a topic that almost everyone knows something about.

You can read more about Dr Petra Boynton on http://www.drpetra.co.uk/ and you can watch her talk via the webcasting section of the Science Oxford Live website http://www.scienceoxfordlive.com/watch-us-archive/science-oxford-live-s-greatest-hits-sex-webcast

The below video discusses how this is done.

Shark attacks are most likely to occur on Sunday, in less than 6 feet of water, during a new moon and involve surfers wearing black and white bathing suits, a first of its kind study from the University of Florida suggests.

Researchers analyzed statistics from shark attacks that occurred in Florida’s Volusia County, dubbed the “Shark Attack Capital of the World,” between 1956 and 2008. They also spent a year observing people between Daytona Beach and New Smyrna Beach, said George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at UF.

“It’s basically an analysis of why, where and when in an area that traditionally has had more shark-human interactions than any other stretch of coastline in the world,” he said. “One of our students, Brittany Garner, essentially camped out there, counted the number of heads on the beach and took photographs.”

While this 47-mile-long section of Central Florida’s Atlantic coast leads in human-shark skirmishes, making up 21 percent of all global attacks between 1999 and 2008, most are “hit and run” incidents that seldom cause serious injury and no fatalities occurred, he said.

“Calling them attacks is probably a misnomer because the consequences are usually no more severe than a dog bite,” he said. “They’re not the same kind of bites made by 10- to 20-foot-long white sharks that you have off the coast of California. Here we see a different style of attack, primarily perpetrated by smaller fish-eating sharks such as spinners and blacktips that are less than 6 to 7 feet long, which because of their size normally seek smaller prey.”

There have been 231 shark attacks between the first one reported in 1956 in Volusia County and 2008, said Burgess, who works at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. The study, part of which was published recently in the edited volume “Sharks and Their Relatives II,” uses statistics from 220 of those cases for which detailed information is available.

Human, shark and environmental factors combine to create a perfect storm of favorable conditions in Volusia County for attacks, particularly near Ponce Inlet between Daytona Beach and New Smyrna Beach, he said.

The more people in the water the greater the chances they will encounter a shark, and New Smyrna Beach south of the inlet is a “hot spot” for surfers with its well developed sand bars and good waves, Burgess said. Hand splashing and feet kicking provoke sharks, which bite and release what they mistake for normal prey items in the turbid waters, he said.

Also, the strong tidal flow in the inlet makes it “an aquatic smorgasbord of food items for sharks, barracudas, mackerel and other large predators,” boosting shark numbers, he said.

Young white males were attacked most because they spend the most time in the water, Burgess said. Ninety percent of victims were male, 77 percent of 196 victims were between 11 and 30 years old and in the 171 cases where race was known, 98 percent were white, he said.

Well over half of the 220 victims were bit on the leg — 158 — more than five times the number bit on the arms — 34 — the second highest body part to be injured, he said.

Surfers were the most frequent victims, making up 61 percent of the total, Burgess said. They tended to be bitten more in the early morning and late afternoon when waves were highest and they spend more time surfing, he said.

“At the time of the attack, most of the surfers were sitting or holding onto the board waiting for a wave, which explains why most surf victims were bitten on the legs,” he said.

Sharks are not weekend warriors. Rather it is human leisure that leads to the fewest number of human encounters on Wednesdays and the highest on Sundays, followed by Saturdays, Burgess said. “There are a fair number of attacks on Fridays as well, reflective of people skipping work and taking three-day weekends,” he said.

The greatest number of attacks occurred during new moons, followed by full moons, the edges of the lunar extreme when the moon has its biggest pull on the tidal phase, Burgess said. Probably the moon’s phases influence the movements and reproductive patterns of fish, the shark’s food source, just as they affect human behavior, he said.

Not surprisingly, attacks were highest during the swimming season, from May through October, peaking in August, Burgess said. They spiked in April as sharks began their seasonal northern migration up the eastern coast of the United States, he said.

Most incidents involved one bite, occurred in turbid, murky or muddy waters and were at the water’s surface, Burgess said. Only one attack was on a diver, he said.

More victims wore swimsuits that were black and white than any other color combination, followed by black and yellow, attesting to sharks’ abilities to see contrast, he said.

Between 1999 and 2008, shark attacks worldwide numbered 639, of which there were 428 reports in the United States, 275 in Florida and 135 in Volusia County. Burgess said.

Bats’ remarkable ability to ‘see’ in the dark uses the echoes from their own calls to decipher the shape of their dark surroundings. This process, known as echolocation, allows bats to perceive their surroundings in great detail, detecting insect prey or identifying threatening predators, and is a skill that engineers are hoping to replicate.

A team of British researchers has worked with six adult Egyptian fruit bats from Tropical World in Leeds to record and recreate their calls. These calls are pairs of ‘clicks’ from the bats’ tongues that they use to fill their surroundings with acoustic energy; the echoes that return allow the bats to form an image of their environment.

New research published today, Tuesday 11 May, in IOP Publishing’s Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, describes how engineers and biologists from the Universities of Strathclyde and Leeds worked with the bats to record their double-click echolocation call, and its returning echoes, using a miniature wireless microphone sensor mounted on the bat whilst in flight.

During echolocation, some bats are known to use a natural acoustic gain control. This allows them to emit high-intensity calls without deafening themselves, and then to hear the weak echoes returning from surrounding objects. The researchers replicated this system in electronics to allow the sensor to record both the emitted and reflected echolocation signals, providing an insight into the full echolocation process.

The six bats performed up to sixteen flights each along a flight corridor. Each flight was short – lasting only about three seconds – but, with the bats’ clicks only lasting a quarter of a millisecond, a large number of calls were recorded for the scientists to analyse.

Once back into the laboratory, the researchers were able to accurately recreate the echolocation calls using a custom-built ultrasonic loudspeaker. This technique will allow the signals and processes bats use to be applied to human engineering systems such as sonar. Specifically, the researchers are looking to apply these techniques in the positioning of robotic vehicles, used in structural testing applications.

Lead author Simon Whiteley from the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, said, “We aim to understand the echolocation process that bats have evolved over millennia, and employ similar signals and techniques in engineering systems. We are currently looking to apply these methods to positioning of robotic vehicles, which are used for structural testing. This will provide enhanced information on the robots’ locations, and hence the location of any structural flaws they may detect.”

PETMAN
“PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot for testing chemical protection clothing used by the US Army. Unlike previous suit testers, which had to be supported mechanically and had a limited repertoire of motion, PETMAN will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents. PETMAN will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions.”

Find out more about PETMAN here.

RiSE: The Amazing Climbing Robot.
“RiSE is a robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE uses feet with micro-claws to climb on textured surfaces. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and its tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents.”

Find out more about RiSE here.

BigDog: The Most Advanced Rough-Terrain Robot on Earth
“BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics robots. It is a rough-terrain robot that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by an engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog has four legs that are articulated like an animal’s, with compliant elements to absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule; about 3 feet long, 2.5 feet tall and weighs 240 lbs.”

Find out more about BigDog here.

Visit the Boston Dynamics website here.

A 95-million-year-old am­ber de­pos­it is adding new­found fun­gus, in­sects, spi­ders, nem­a­tode worms, and bac­te­ria to the por­trait of an an­cient ec­o­sys­tem al­so shared by di­no­saurs, sci­en­tists say.

Am­ber is hard­ened, fos­sil­ized tree sap whose glassy, jewel-like and yel­low­ish form of­ten con­tains small crea­tures trapped from the time of its or­i­gin and pre­served nearly per­fect­ly.

The new­found de­pos­it, dat­ed to the Cre­ta­ceous era that was the last ma­jor pe­ri­od of the di­no­saurs, is re­ported to be the first ma­jor dis­cov­ery of its kind from Af­ri­ca.

The find­ing may al­so pro­vide in­sights in­to the rise and di­ver­sifica­t­ion of flow­er­ing plants dur­ing the Cre­ta­ceous, re­search­ers say. A re­port by 20 sci­en­tists on the dis­cov­ery, in the cur­rent is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­tional Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, re­con­structs an an­cient trop­i­cal for­est un­cov­ered in pre­s­ent-day Ethi­o­pia.

“Un­til now, we had discov­ered vir­tu­ally no Cre­ta­ceous am­ber sites from the south­ern hemi­sphere’s Gond­wanan su­per­con­ti­nent, a land mass that in­clud­ed mod­ern Af­ri­ca, said re­search group mem­ber Paul Nascim­bene of the Amer­i­can Mu­se­um of Nat­u­ral His­to­ry in New York. “Sig­nif­i­cant Cre­ta­ceous am­ber de­pos­its had been found pri­marily in North Amer­i­ca and Eura­sia.”

“The first an­giosperms, or flow­er­ing plants, ap­peared and di­ver­si­fied in the Cre­ta­ceous,” added Al­ex­an­der Schmidt of the Uni­vers­ity of Göt­tin­gen in Ger­ma­ny, an­oth­er of the in­ves­ti­ga­tors. “Their rise to dom­i­nance dras­tic­ally changed ter­res­tri­al ec­o­sys­tems, and the Ethi­o­pi­an am­ber de­pos­it sheds light on this time of change.”

While some of the au­thors worked on the ge­o­log­i­cal set­ting and the fos­sils en­tombed with­in the am­ber, Nascim­bene, with Ken­neth An­der­son of South­ern Il­li­nois Uni­vers­ity, stud­ied the am­ber it­self. They found that the res­in that seeped from these Cre­ta­ceous Gond­wanan trees is si­m­i­lar chem­ic­ally to more re­cent am­bers from flow­er­ing plants in Mi­o­cene de­pos­its found in Mex­i­co and the Do­min­i­can Re­pub­lic. The am­ber’s chem­ical de­signa­t­ion is Class Ic, and it is the only Ic fos­sil res­in discov­ered thus far from the Cre­ta­ceous. All oth­er doc­u­mented Cre­ta­ceous am­bers are from non-flow­er­ing plants, or gym­nosperms.

“The tree that pro­duced the sap is still un­known, but the am­ber’s chem­is­try is sur­pris­ingly very much like that of a group of more re­cent New World an­giosperms [flow­er­ing plants] called Hy­menaea,” says Nascim­bene. “This am­ber could be from an early an­gi­o­sperm or a previously-unknown co­ni­fer that is quite dis­tinct from the oth­er known Cre­ta­ceous am­ber-producing gym­nosperms.”

Oth­er team mem­bers discov­ered 30 in­sects and spi­ders trapped in the am­ber from thir­teen fam­i­lies of or­gan­isms. These fos­sils rep­re­sent some of the ear­li­est Af­ri­can fos­sil records for a va­ri­e­ty of types, in­clud­ing wasps, bark­lice, moths, bee­tles, a prim­i­tive ant, a rare in­sect called a zorapte­ran, and a sheet-web weav­ing spi­der. Par­a­sit­ic fun­gi that lived on the trees were al­so found, as well as fil­a­ments of bac­te­ria and the re­mains of flow­er­ing plants and ferns.

If life has evolved on Sat­urn’s frig­id moon, Ti­tan, it would be strange, smelly—and po­tent­ial­ly ex­plo­sive, new re­search sug­gests.

The con­clu­sions come from as­tro­bi­ol­o­gist Wil­liam Bains, who pre­s­ents his re­search at the Na­tional As­tron­o­my Meet­ing in Glas­gow, Scot­land on April 13.

“Hol­ly­wood would have prob­lems with these al­iens,” said Bains. “Beam one on­to the Star­ship En­ter­prise and it would boil and then burst in­to flames, and the fumes would kill eve­ry­one in range. Even a ti­ny whiff of its breath would smell un­be­lievably hor­ri­ble.

“But I think it is all the more in­ter­est­ing for that rea­son. Would­n’t it be sad if the most al­ien things we found in the gal­axy were just like us, but blue and with tail­s?” added Bains, re­fer­ring to the tall ex­tra­ter­res­tri­als from the mov­ie Av­a­tar.

Bains, whose re­search is car­ried out through Ru­fus Sci­en­tif­ic Ltd. in Cam­bridge, U.K. and the Mas­sachusetts In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, is stu­dy­ing just how ex­treme life’s chem­is­try can be.

Life on Ti­tan, Sat­urn’s larg­est moon, is one of strang­er sce­nar­i­os un­der ex­amina­t­ion. Ti­tan is twice as large as our Moon and has a thick at­mos­phere of freez­ing, or­ange smog. At ten times our dis­tance from the Sun, it is a frig­id place, with a sur­face tem­per­a­ture of mi­nus 180 de­grees Cel­si­us (mi­nus 292 Fah­ren­heit). All the wa­ter is ice; the only liq­uids are meth­ane and eth­ane, fill­ing what sci­en­tists be­lieve are ponds and lakes.

“So, if life were to ex­ist on Ti­tan, it must have blood based on liq­uid meth­ane, not wa­ter. That means its whole chem­is­try is radic­ally dif­fer­ent. The mo­le­cules must be made of a wid­er va­ri­e­ty of el­e­ments than we use, but put to­geth­er in smaller molecules. It would al­so be much more chem­ic­ally re­ac­tive,” said Bains.

This blood would have to con­tain dis­solved chem­icals, but few chem­icals dis­solve easily in liq­uid meth­ane. Most mo­le­cules can’t dis­solve in it if they have more than six atoms not count­ing eas­ily-dis­solved hy­dro­gen. So a me­tab­o­lism run­ning in liq­uid meth­ane will have to be built of smaller mo­le­cules than in Earth bio­chem­is­try, which is typ­ic­ally built of mod­ules of around 10 atoms apart from hy­dro­gen.

You can only build around 3,400 dif­fer­ent mo­le­cules with­in the above-described lim­ita­t­ions on Ti­tan, Bains said. In con­trast, he added, one can build around 10 mil­lion or more dif­fer­ent mo­le­cules fit­ting Earth’s re­quired spe­cif­ica­t­ions, al­though only about 700 are ac­tu­ally used.

“The is­sue is not how many mo­le­cules you can make, but wheth­er you can make the col­lec­tion you need to as­sem­ble a me­tab­o­lism. It is like try­ing to find bits of wood in a lumber-yard to make a ta­ble. In the­o­ry you only need five. But you may have a lumber-yard full of off­cuts and still not find ex­actly the right five… so you need the po­ten­tial to make many more mo­le­cules than you ac­tu­ally need. Thus the six-atom chem­icals on Ti­tan would have to in­clude much more di­verse bond types [link­ing the atoms] and probably more di­verse el­e­ments, in­clud­ing sul­phur and phos­pho­rus.”

The el­e­ments would have to ap­pear in much more di­verse forms, as well as in forms that would be highly un­sta­ble on the Earth en­vi­ron­ment—hence the ex­plo­siveness, he added.

En­er­gy is anoth­er fac­tor that would af­fect the type of life that could evolve on Ti­tan. With sun­light a tenth of a per­cent as in­tense on Ti­tan’s sur­face as on the sur­face of Earth, en­er­gy is probably in short sup­ply. “Rapid move­ment or growth needs a lot of en­er­gy, so slow-growing, lichen-like or­gan­isms are pos­si­ble in the­o­ry, but ve­loci­rap­tors are pret­ty much ruled out,” said Bains.

Image Credit: © 2008 Karl Ko­foed

Oxfordshire Science Festival
This event is part of the Oxfordshire Science Festival 2010. For more information visit the website.

We let you, our readers, decide what object you would most like to see scanned; by voting on the following question:

WHAT SPECIMEN BEST REPRESENTS ‘CLEAN AND GREEN’?

Our readers decided:

A Solar Panel Cell – Representing how clean energy may save us from our polluting past?

Our sample is currently being scanned and we hope to have it back and be able to share some pictures with you by the end of the month! – Watch this space…

You can find out more about the Science Oxford Clean and Green Festival here.

Autopsies remain the best way of finding out why someone died, but it’s not always the way it’s shown on TV. In this interactive event, you’ll have a chance to watch a virtual autopsy and talk to the people who perform the procedure. Come and find out how autopsies help doctors understand more about disease and provide information that benefits future generations.

Supported by The Royal College of Pathologists

Further Information

This event is being run by the Royal College of Pathologists. Pathologist John du Parcq, Mario Di Maggio and Ruth Semple from the Royal College of Pathologists will be running this event.

Feedback from this event in the past:
“This was an excellent event – very interesting and enjoyable.”
“I loved how interactive it was.”
“Thank you for an amazing Saturday.”

Related websites:
www.rcpath.org
www.nationalpathologyweek.org

View image here.

ESO has just released a stunning new image of the vast cloud known as the Cat’s Paw Nebula or NGC 6334. This complex region of gas and dust, where numerous massive stars are born, lies near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, and is heavily obscured by intervening dust clouds.

Few objects in the sky have been as well named as the Cat’s Paw Nebula, a glowing gas cloud resembling the gigantic pawprint of a celestial cat out on an errand across the Universe. British astronomer John Herschel first recorded NGC 6334 in 1837 during his stay in South Africa. Despite using one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time, Herschel seems to have only noted the brightest part of the cloud, seen here towards the lower left.

NGC 6334 lies about 5500 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion) and covers an area on the sky slightly larger than the full Moon. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. The nebula appears red because its blue and green light are scattered and absorbed more efficiently by material between the nebula and Earth. The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars.

NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy and has been extensively studied by astronomers. The nebula conceals freshly minted brilliant blue stars — each nearly ten times the mass of our Sun and born in the last few million years. The region is also home to many baby stars that are buried deep in the dust, making them difficult to study. In total, the Cat’s Paw Nebula could contain several tens of thousands of stars.

Particularly striking is the red, intricate bubble in the lower right part of the image. This is most likely either a star expelling large amount of matter at high speed as it nears the end of its life or the remnant of a star that already has exploded.

This new portrait of the Cat’s Paw Nebula was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining images taken through blue, green and red filters, as well as a special filter designed to let through the light of glowing hydrogen.

In the new block­bust­er film Av­a­tar, hu­mans vis­it the hab­it­a­ble—and in­hab­it­ed—al­ien moon Pan­do­ra. Life-bearing moons like Pan­do­ra or the Star Wars for­est moon of En­dor are a sta­ple of sci­ence fic­tion.

But hab­it­a­ble moons may soon be­come sci­ence fact, and could per­haps even ex­ist around the same star that il­lu­mi­nates the fic­tional Pan­do­ra, as­tro­no­mers say.

“If Pan­do­ra ex­isted, we po­ten­tially could de­tect it and study its at­mos­phere in the next decade,” said Li­sa Kal­te­neg­ger of the Har­vard-Smith­son­ian Cen­ter for As­t­ro­phys­ics in Cam­bridge, Mass.

A new pa­per by Kal­te­neg­ger ar­gues that NASA’s new James Webb Space Tel­e­scope, to be launched in 2014, will be able to study their at­mos­pheres and de­tect key gas­es like car­bon di­ox­ide, ox­y­gen, and wa­ter va­por.

So far, plan­et searches have spot­ted hun­dreds of Ju­pi­ter-sized ob­jects in a range of or­bits. Such gi­ant gas plan­ets, while eas­i­er to de­tect, could not serve as homes for life as we know it. How­ev­er, sci­en­tists have spec­u­lat­ed wheth­er a rocky moon or­bit­ing a gas gi­ant could be life-friendly, if that plan­et or­bited with­in the star’s hab­it­a­ble zone, the re­gion warm enough for liq­uid wa­ter to ex­ist.

“All of the gas gi­ant plan­ets in our so­lar sys­tem have rocky and icy moons,” said Kal­te­neg­ger. “That raises the pos­si­bil­ity that al­ien Ju­pi­ters will al­so have moons. Some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold on­to an at­mos­phere.”

NASA’s space-based Kep­ler tel­e­scope looks for plan­ets that cross in front of their host stars, which cre­ates a mini-eclipse and dims the star by a small but de­tecta­ble amount. Such a trans­it lasts only hours and re­quires ex­act align­ment of star and plan­et along our line of sight.

Once they have found an al­ien Ju­pi­ter, as­tro­no­mers can look for or­bit­ing moons. A moon’s gra­vity would tug on the plan­et and ei­ther speed or slow its trans­it, de­pend­ing on wheth­er the moon leads or trails the plan­et. The re­sult­ing trans­it dura­t­ion varia­t­ions would in­di­cate the moon’s ex­istence.

Once a moon is found, the next ob­vi­ous ques­tion would be: Does it have an at­mos­phere? If it does, those gas­es will ab­sorb a frac­tion of the star’s light dur­ing the trans­it, leav­ing a ti­ny, tell­tale fin­ger­print to the at­mos­phere’s com­po­si­tion.

The sig­nal is strongest for large worlds with hot, puffy at­mos­pheres, but an Earth-sized moon could be stud­ied if con­di­tions are just right. For ex­am­ple, the separa­t­ion of moon and plan­et needs to be large enough that we could catch just the moon in trans­it, while its plan­et is off to one side of the star.

Kal­te­neg­ger cal­cu­lat­ed what con­di­tions are best for ex­am­in­ing the at­mos­pheres of al­ien moons. She found that Al­pha Cen­tau­ri A, the sys­tem fea­tured in Av­a­tar, would be an ex­cel­lent tar­get.

“Al­pha Cen­tau­ri A is a bright, near­by star very si­m­i­lar to our Sun, so it gives us a strong sig­nal,” Kalteneg­ger ex­plained. “You would only need a hand­ful of trans­its to find wa­ter, ox­y­gen, car­bon di­ox­ide, and meth­ane on an Earth-like moon such as Pan­do­ra.”

While Al­pha Cen­tau­ri A of­fers tan­ta­liz­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties, small, dim, red dwarf stars are bet­ter tar­gets in the hunt for hab­it­a­ble plan­ets or moons, she added. The hab­it­a­ble zone for a red dwarf is clos­er to the star, which in­creases the prob­a­bil­ity of a trans­it.

As­tro­no­mers have de­bat­ed wheth­er tid­al lock­ing could be a prob­lem for red dwarfs. A plan­et close enough to be in the hab­it­a­ble zone would al­so be close enough for the star’s gra­vity to slow it un­til one side al­ways faces the star. (The same pro­cess keeps one side of the Moon al­ways fac­ing Earth.) One side of the plan­et then would be baked in con­stant sun­light, while the oth­er side would freeze in con­stant dark­ness.

An moon in the hab­it­a­ble zone would­n’t face this di­lem­ma. The moon would be tid­ally locked to its plan­et, not to the star, and there­fore would have reg­u­lar day-night cy­cles just like Earth. Its at­mos­phere would mod­er­ate tem­per­a­tures, and plant life would have a source of en­er­gy moon-wide.

“Alien moons or­bit­ing gas gi­ant plan­ets may be more likely to be hab­it­a­ble than tid­ally locked Earth-sized plan­ets or super-Earths,” said Kal­te­neg­ger. “We should cer­tainly keep them in mind as we work to­ward the ul­ti­mate goal of find­ing al­ien life.”

Scott Fleming of the University of Florida has also argued that a single habitable-zone gas giant could serve as a “signpost” for perhaps several habitable moons.

Kalteneg­ger’s pa­per is posted on­line at the arXiv database of Cor­nell Un­ivers­ity in New York.

Image Credit: Da­vid A. Aguilar, CfA

You have to watch the video below. It’s called the Known Universe and is a great animation showing just how small the Earth is. It shows how far the first Human radio signals will have travelled, the parts of the universe we have mapped and the extend of the visible universe.

If you wanted to try this at home all you need is:

• A cup cornstarch
• A bowl
• About half a cup of water
• A spoon
• A small tray
• (Optional) Food colouring

Directions:
Simply empty your cup of starch into the bowl. Stir while you add the water slowly, keep adding until the consistency becomes like thick pancake batter. If you wanted to add food colouring, add a couple of drops at this point.
Now is this time to have a play:

• Stick your hands into the mixture.
• What does it feel like?
• What happens when you slap the surface or try to roll some into a ball and then leave it alone?

So whats going on?

I’m sure you would have heard about states of matter, we usually talk about the three types: solids, liquids and gases.

A mixture of cornstarch and water make what is known as a suspension. When you squeeze a Cornstarch Suspension it really feels like a solid because its molecules line up. But it looks like a liquid and acts like a liquid when no one is pressing on it because the molecules relax. This is another state of matter, called a suspension (It can act like a liquid, or, when pressed like a solid.).

Tat­toos and body pierc­ings—com­mon world­wide since an­cient times—may ex­ist be­cause they ef­fec­tively ad­ver­tise ro­bust health and good genes to po­ten­tial mates, a study pro­poses.

Bi­ol­o­gists the­o­rize that many risky, costly and ap­par­ently use­less be­hav­iors per­sist am­ong ani­mals be­cause of what they com­mu­ni­cate to po­ten­tial mates, ri­vals and oth­ers. For ex­am­ple, an ex­pen­sive Rolex watch may be no more use­ful or pret­ti­er than a Timex, but for some peo­ple it serves a func­tion by cre­at­ing an au­ra of wealth.

A field of ev­o­lu­tion­ary bi­ol­o­gy called sig­nal­ing the­o­ry ex­am­ines such be­hav­iors.

“Hon­est sig­nals” are de­fined as sig­nals that are hard to fake and thus make bet­ter ad­ver­tisements. For in­stance, the Rolex may not show true fi­nan­cial sol­id­ity; you might have just over­drawn your cred­it card or be run­ning a Ponzi scheme.

On the oth­er hand, if you stick a met­al pin through your cheek with­out suf­fer­ing any ill ef­fects, that may ac­tu­ally say some­thing about your im­mune sys­tem, es­pe­cially if dis­in­fec­tion has­n’t been in­vented yet. Thus, it could be an hon­est sig­nal of health, if per­haps not of the sharpest mind.

Sla­womir Koziel of the Pol­ish Acad­e­my of Sci­ences’ In­sti­tute of An­thro­po­l­ogy in Wro­claw, Po­land, and col­leagues de­cid­ed to ex­plore wheth­er body-de­cor­ated peo­ple ac­tu­ally do have bet­ter health than aver­age.

They meas­ured lev­els of bodily sym­me­try in 200 peo­ple with and with­out tat­tooes and un­con­ven­tion­al pierc­ings. Many sci­en­tists con­sid­er such sym­me­try as an in­di­ca­tor of healthy de­vel­op­ment.

Sym­me­try was sig­nif­i­cantly high­er in the tat­tooed-and-pierced group, es­pe­cially in men, the re­search­ers found.

“High­er body sym­me­try of the men hav­ing tat­toos or pierc­ing in­di­cates that this type of body de­cora­t­ion in the West­ern so­ci­e­ty can be re­lat­ed to the hon­est sig­nal of bi­o­log­i­cal qual­ity only for men,” Koziel and col­leagues wrote, de­scrib­ing their find­ings in a pa­per slat­ed for pub­lica­t­ion in the re­search jour­nal Ev­o­lu­tion and Hu­man Be­hav­ior.

“Both tat­toos and pierc­ings can pre­s­ent health risks,” such as due to blood-borne dis­eases, they not­ed, and it’s the abil­ity to take such risks suc­cess­fully that of­fers the bi­o­log­i­cal sig­nal.

It has­n’t been clear to date why tat­tooes and pierc­ings are done, the re­search­ers said. Such de­cora­t­ions can mark mem­ber­ship in a group of some sort, yet of­ten only some group mem­bers opt for these badges of mem­ber­ship. One pos­si­ble ex­plana­t­ion was that peo­ple get tat­tooes and pierc­ings in or­der to dis­tract from some phys­i­cal short­com­ing, but the study re­sults seemed to con­tra­dict this view, Koziel and col­leagues re­marked.

They al­so found that among males in their stu­dy, the most com­mon tat­too loca­t­ions were arms and legs, where­as in fe­males it was back and stom­ach. Pierc­ing were most of­ten on the face (76 per­cent) of males and on the ab­do­men (46 per­cent) of fe­males.